African American English, racialized femininities, and Asian American identity in Ali Wong's Baby Cobra

We analyze Asian American comedian Ali Wong's linguistic and embodied performance in her 2016 stand-up special, Baby Cobra, through a genre-specific lens to investigate how stand-up comedy's performance conventions shape her comedic persona. We argue that Wong uses communicative forms indexically associated with Blackness to perform racialized and gendered figures of personhood, including the white “Karen,” “sassy Black woman,” and “Asian grandmother.” This performance allows Wong to challenge hegemonic whiteness and dominant racializations of Asian women but relies on signs potentially interpreted as reproducing anti-Black ideologies. We situate Wong as an individual performer, “Asian American” as an ethnoracial category vis-à-vis Blackness, and the linguistic practices of Asian and Black American communities within racial capitalist histories that have shaped contemporary raciolinguistic ideologies. Rather than approach language varieties and racialized groups as necessarily distinct, we treat them as relational—as necessarily intimately and historically connected.